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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview I-0084, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
S. Davis (Dave) Phillips, a successful High Point, North Carolina, businessman and Commerce Secretary under Governor Jim Martin, discusses business in North Carolina and his own success as a businessman. Phillips helped build High Point into the global furniture capital it is today, and when he assumed his position at the state Department of Commerce, he focused on luring businesses to North Carolina, a state where infrastructure and the natural environment provided their own incentives. Phillips is proud of his tenure in the government and of his efforts to push forward Martin's regionalist strategy of including every area of the state in North Carolina's economic development.
North Carolina business leader and former Commerce Secretary S. Davis (Dave) Phillips discusses his personal successes as a businessman in High Point and his successes as Commerce Secretary under Governor Jim Martin.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Are you trying to listen to me to see if it's recording correctly?
That looks good. Let me just top this at the start here. This is an interview with Mr. Dave Phillips in High Point, North Carolina on Wednesday, January 27, 1999 for the Southern Oral History Program's North Carolina Business History Series. This is cassette 1.27.99-DP, like Dave Phillips. My name is Joe Mosnier. Mr. Phillips, I thought we might start with just a quick sketch of your early involvements in the furniture business say coming out of school and going to work in your family's company. I'm going to ask sort of what the furniture industry looked to you like, looked like to you in that year.
Well, I came from Chapel Hill and was able to join my father's textile
business. The name of the company was Phillips-Davis at the time. It was
a company that he had started forty some years previous. It was a
converter, meaning you would buy and sell product. He had gone to
certain mills like Cannon Mills and would buy it by the large contract
and be able to sell it by the roll, which meant fifty yards, to the
different furniture companies, not only in North Carolina but also in
America. We didn't export a lot back then. North Carolina was known as
the upholstery furniture capital along with the regular furniture,
meaning casegoods. Since that time, the upholstered market has expanded
all over to where it's from a transportation standpoint the pieces are
bulky. So it's easy to set up an upholstery shop all over America. You
have a strong upholstery market, not only in North Carolina but also in
Mississippi in California and what have you. It's different than
casegoods. Casegoods is when you're making wood products, the investment
is so enormous, the brick and mortar and machinery. The amount produced
at
Then also North Carolina now maintains its reputation as the furniture capital of the world because of the showrooms in High Point. About eight million square feet are located in High Point that show furniture twice a year for about ten days, which seems an enormous investment, which it is. But there used to be lots of regional markets, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, and Atlanta. All of those regional markets now have basically disappeared or become very small in their particular region. Now High Point is sophisticated enough to where people can come, have a drink, stay in a decent hotel and can accommodate all the people from around the world.
High Point when I first got into business in 1966 in the textile end of the business, my father had been in the foam business and the spring business, which are suppliers to the furniture industry. He was also in the factoring business. But you might think what commonality is there among all this and it is simply the customer. That client that you get to know, you sell them all these different products. So it's that relationship. Then the showroom business is a part of it. My family has been involved in many aspects of the furniture industry as suppliers. We've never manufactured furniture per se. I was thrilled to get into the textile end of the business because I thought it was very creative, very dynamic. The foam business wasn't as exciting. It was more of an engineered type product as was the spring business. The factoring business is almost an engineered product. Anyway, I had the opportunity to get in the textile end of it.
Over the next ten years I learned that the need to be vertical, to
control your own manufacturing was going to be very important. That's
where you're going to make the most money, but also the need to simply
survive. The old days of being a converter were limited in my opinion. I
was the first quote converter to go out and buy a manufacturing plant. I
did that in the mid-seventies. My father died in '75. He was ill for
several years. In '74 is when I actually bought into a manufacturing
plant. Within the next few years I bought control and a hundred percent
ownership. That's been the basis of our evolution from Phillips-Davis
the converter to Phillips Mills the vertical textile mill. Then we
bought other plants. We started exporting. We computerized. We had state
of the art machinery. It became a very sophisticated, stylish but
commercial product. We sold the likes of the Broyhills and Bassetts and
La-Z-Boy who in turn sold to the Sears, the Wards, the Levitt's. So it
was mass America. By the time I sold the business a year and a half ago,
we had become the tenth largest, within the top ten, ranked eighth or
ninth largest upholstery fabric mill in the world. We export a lot of
our products, up to one-third, to the world markets: the Middle East, a
lot of business in places like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, a lot of places
in the old Soviet Union, Poland, Russia, very little to the Far East,
some to Australia and New Zealand, very little to South America, Latin
America. At one time we had a manufacturing plant in Canada. When free
trade came about, we sold that plant because we couldn't compete with
ourselves. Prior to that we would simply manufacture in Canada what we
had created in America and had already sold and had commitments to the
Canadians for. They simply made it up there. With free trade, all that
changed. But anyway that was a very exciting episode in my life to where
we took a small business and built it up to doing a substantial amount
of business and sold it
Let me ask you this. Approximately when did you take the decision to sink all this money into refitting your plants, your plant? How did you measure the prospects? That's a lot of recapitalization. You've got to go in and buy new machinery. How did you measure the prospects for that sort of investment from your end of the furniture textiles business? This issue of technology and textiles across the last twenty or thirty years is obviously a very important and interesting one.
Good question. We bought the original plant in '74. I bought into a
plant that had old equipment. I soon learned that you are not going to
make a lot of money if you have old equipment. The quality is not as
good. Your efficiency, your labor cost is too high. So I took the first
step of upgrading it once I owned control and actually moved the plant
to another building and put in at that time better equipment, not all
new equipment but better equipment. Then through the '80s some other
equipment started hitting the market. We built a second plant about ten
years ago and bought all brand-new equipment. That's when we really
started making a lot of money because it was absolutely the best
quality. We got computerized to where our creativity could be translated
on a piece of machinery in a very short period of time. Instead of
months, we could do it within days. Therefore we had better placements
with better customers because we were providing them a greater service
of creativity. Our styling staff, we used a couple of people and when I
sold it, we ended up having twelve full-time designers creating product.
The same thing's happened to a lot of other industries, the car
What put you ahead of the competitive curve? Why wasn't there someone, why wasn't Mr. Smith down the road also seeing this opportunity? How did you get ahead of that game, win that market?
Some of the competition had done a better job. I had watched them, and I had seen them pull away. It was because of better machinery, and it was because they had a lot of designers. So I used this as a way in which I saw how they became successful that I had to do the same thing. I had a lot of competition that didn't do the same thing, and they fell behind or went out of business. So it was either do or don't. It became very obvious to me that I had to do it.
And you mostly competed down the road then on quality.
Quality and design. But not on price. We had to be competitive, but price was not the main factor.
Tell me about the financial services end of your financial involvements back then. A brief sketch of factoring services in the furniture industry and so forth.
In the old Phillips-Davis company, there was a financial officer named
Bill Webster. Bill in the '50s before my father said, 'We are paying a
factoring company a lot of fees to protect our accounts receivable,'
which simply meant buying the accounts receivable and collecting the
money and guaranteeing a certain amount of money back to
However, they exited the furniture industry and went after lots of other industries, which makes sense. So we just simply said, 'Let's do it all over again.' Bill Webster was available. The office space was available. The same furniture was available. So we just set up shop within six months and started all over again. Even the name Factors, Inc. was still available but we felt that we should change the name so we called it First Factors. Bill Webster was the President, and we started off as a subsidiary of Phillips-Davis. It did very well.
We did one thing that was very interesting that made us so successful so
quickly in that factoring company. That was, previously my father had
borrowed a lot of money from a lot of different banks. I went to a bank
called First Union who was just emerging in North Carolina and said,
'Look if we gave you all of our accounts receivable instead of loaning
money to us personally or to just the corporation, we pledge all of the
receivables to you as collateral. It's like inventory or everything
else. Would you loan us the money
My father died in the mid '70s and as the business grew, the textile business was growing; the factoring business was growing. My brother and I owned approximately forty percent each of what—we owned forty percent of the holding company, which is Phillips Davis, which owned these other companies. There was a guy Jimmy Foscue who owned twenty percent. We came to the conclusion that we needed to go our separate ways. So in 1979 I sold my interest in the factoring business to Jimmy Foscue and Phil Phillips. They sold me their interest in the textile business.
Well as it turned out within six months we—oh I had an inquiry from two
guys who ran the First Union operation locally and said they wanted to
get into the savings and loan business because that was the thing
happening in North Carolina. We had privatized savings and loans, all
these mutuals. I said, 'I've got a better idea because that's a very
competitive business. It is very regulated. Why don't we go back into
the factoring business if they're going to leave the bank.' They had
seen the success that we had achieved in the factoring company because
of our relationships. So we started Phillips Factors. We laughed about
it, and we talked about it shouldn't we call it Second Factors or
Guilford Factors or North Carolina Factors, but we factor all the
company so we called it Phillips Factors because it ties into Phillips
Mills. We were trying to talk about keeping the name confidential away
from ownership by the parent company, which still was going to be
Philips Mills or Phillips Industries because we factor a lot of
competition. We factor a lot of our suppliers. We factor a lot of our
customers. Everybody would
GE Capital?
GE Capital. My brother, when he found out that I was selling to BB and T, called me and wanted to buy our factoring company. I said, 'I've already signed a deal with BB and T.' He said, 'With their clout and financial capabilities it's going to put a lot of pressure on them, First Factors.' Therefore he'll have to find someone to buy him because when these banks get involved, they have unlimited funds. Therefore, they can be so competitive. They just take all the profit out. So within a short period of time, he sold out to GE Capital. So in the last, the other—that's how the financial services business evolved.
Tell me about how you came to be involved in furniture marketing and Market Square here in High Point and the story, a very successful story of really reshape, continuing to shape that emerging aspects of—
It is going to be incredible what this does for the city of High Point.
We have sold to a company called Vornado, a very large real estate
investment trust listed on the New York Stock Exchange run by some
quality people. The head of Goldman, Sachs
But as to how we got here, Market Square is an idea that came about
because of me going to the furniture market, regional furniture markets.
I came back from San Francisco market in the late '70s. The way I used
to come to work was right across from Market Square. I looked up and I'd
been passing this building my entire life. I said that it was identical
to the building I was in in San Francisco called the Icehouse, which was
a wonderful old plant that had been turned into a furniture showroom
complex for decorators in San Francisco. We had, we meaning, I had also
invested in a company called Behrends and Company, which is an
advertising agency. They used to do the state of North Carolina's work.
Used to be called Bennett Advertising and then Bennett, Harwell and
Henderson. They were a major tenant of mine in another building. I had
been asked to invest and became the Chairman of the Board and Dick
Behrends ran it. Anyway, the man who used to run the International Home
Furnishings Market in High
That's when I called Mr. Tomlinson and came over to the building and sat
down with him in his office and said, 'Would you give me an option to
buy your building over a period of time or part of it or half of it or
what have you.' It's five hundred and fifty thousand square feet, but
there is a 200,000 square foot section and then there is a 350,000
square foot part. They debated it and he did. So we called it, Dick
Behrends named it Market Square. We tried to get some people interested
in doing it, the Furniture Manufacturing Association was still taking
place but we would sandblast brick and bring people down here and what
have you. Century Furniture Company were good friends of mine,
fraternity brothers of mine. I called Buck Shuford and I said, 'Buck,
would you consider coming to High Point.' We felt that the whole market
was going to start migrating to this town away from Hickory and Lenoir
and whatever it used to be called, the Figure Eight. The buyers would
come down here and travel over this region of the state because there
was not enough showroom space in High Point or accommodations. He said,
'No. I'm not going to leave my home. I don't want to come down there and
live
The best thing that happened then was the people that bought Tomlinson out of bankruptcy came back to me and said, 'You had this idea. Would you do it again?' and at a much better price. I said, 'Well, for that price, I'll do it again.' Let's talk about it. It was a very reasonable price. Your talking about not spending very much money at all for a five and a half thousand square feet, twelve acres. It's phenomenal. So we put an investor group together, and the people who had bought Tomlinson, two people got in, Chuck Haywood and Jake Froelich. Jake and Chuck, they had been fraternity brothers, not fraternity brothers but roommates in boarding school. Chuck was in the furniture business, and Jake was in the veneer business. I said, 'I think y'all should be part of this thing because as you exited the machinery and slowly move out and we put together a group and slowly move in, let's all do it together.' So they became part of it. A guy named Dave Zagarolli who is a furniture designer in Hickory was the person we asked to be the general manager who would develop the property who would actually design it. He had had some restorations in Hickory. We thought he was pretty good. We got other investors like George Lyles who is a dear friend of my father's and a dear friend of ours. Then Sandy Rankin who is a dear friend. There are some other names. One was the plant manager that we asked to be an investor, and I've forgotten his name. But anyway, there were originally eight investors.
We went back to Buck Shuford. Buck Shuford said that the time had
changed. It was a couple of years later and he felt that he had to go to
High Point because his
Within two years, this place was full. It was an incredible success story. We found people like Natuzzi. Natuzzi now is across the street just moved out. We came across him in Copenhagen, Denmark in a furniture show. He is a baldheaded Italian with a great flair and is the largest leather manufacturer in the world. He is vertical where he grows his own cows, has his own tannery, makes his own foam, makes his own furniture, puts it in boxcars and ships it all over the world on containers. He's phenomenal. But he had never been to the American Market. He came here, rented a little space, took off, and now he does close to a billion dollars around the world. He's built a fabulous new building across the street, cost him fifteen million dollars. It's his showroom that he uses twice a year. So it's just lots of interesting folks like that.
If I could just add on to that. The Market in High Point, the 1.1 million square feet that we've evolved into, we added a tower. The tower was the first mixed use building in the state of North Carolina. We were amazed that it was. We felt Charlotte or somebody had already done something like this, but they had not. The rules had to be rewritten to accommodate us.
This building.
This building we're sitting in right here, Market Square Tower. Eighteen condominiums on the top, a swimming pool, underground parking. The first five floors are an extension of the old building showroom space. The next five floors are office space, primarily for again suppliers mostly fabric people. We sold the condominiums to anybody whether you're a retailer, manufacturer or supplier. They're all very creatively done. It's been an interesting adjunct to the Market.
Then the building itself, what happened, we created a thing called
Showtime. This, the fabric industry, maybe a hundred and fifty, two
hundred suppliers from around the world who sell fabric to the furniture
manufacturers who come here and sell it to the retailers. They had never
had a market all their own. They were always simply told by furniture
manufacturers be in my office or manufacturing plant somewhere in
America on that day, and there was so much wasted energy of all these
suppliers trying to get in all these places. So we said, 'Let's have our
own show. We'll ask the furniture manufacturers to come visit us. We'll
have nice showrooms. It'll be orderly. It'll be efficient.' So we
created Showtime that has now become a necessity in the industry.
Thousands of people come in here from all over the world. The foreign
market comes in
Tell me about what factors you think—North Carolina's economy has really taken off twenty, thirty years. By the way, I'm looking at my watch as well; we need to quit about when?
Oh about ten until—. We've got another thirty minutes.
Tremendous development across the economic scene in North Carolina in the last twenty or thirty years. Tell me what factors at root do you think explain why North Carolina has had such an economic boom across so many new industries as well, across that span of time. Are there essential features of North Carolina of the region that are in play? Why here? Why not?
High Point's a very unusual state.
North Carolina.
What did I say?
You said High Point.
High Point, excuse me. North Carolina, well High Point's very unusual.
Nobody's made that transition like North Carolina's made that
transition. It was all blue-collar towns until the last hundred years as
was Greensboro and Winston primarily. We were the manufacturing center
of America. A greater percentage of the workforce in the Triad and in
North Carolina was in manufacturing than any other area in America. It
had to do with furniture, textiles, and tobacco manufacturing. Well,
those industries have changed dramatically over the last two decades. It
has forced the cities, the counties, and the state to come up with a
strategy to diversify this state. So it started really with
Another example of that, Joe, is the banking industry, which is
phenomenal in North Carolina. You say why? Well, it's not just because
of Crutchfield and McColl trying to compete with each other. That's a
lot of it. And it's wonderful. But North Carolina was the first
state—now I'm saying this but I don't know if it's a hundred percent
correct—but the first state in the south and their might have been
another state in the country, that allowed statewide banking. In other
words, you could go throughout the state of North Carolina and set up
shop. A lot of state charters allowed you to do it in one city here and
one city there. So that's what got Texas in trouble. That's why all the
Texas banks got into trouble with the oil and Houston and Dallas and
whatever it was. They weren't big enough to handle the blows that came
their way. North Carolina passed
You've got another great bank here in North Carolina, Wachovia who used to be the biggest bank in North Carolina and is the best run bank from what everybody says with fewer losses and what have you. Then you've got this bank that all of a sudden started up, Southern National and BB and T, two eastern North Carolina banks that are now, they're the biggest bank in North Carolina on assets in this state. North Carolina is fortunate, and this has helped our profile. The Research Triangle, I tell you, Duke University, our university system, Chapel Hill these are all major assets. The Medical Center, you think about most states. They don't have these medical centers. They don't have three international airports. They don't have the profile that this state has across the board. So they don't look at North Carolina as a textile state or an agriculture state or a tobacco state. I mean, we're big in hog manufacturing and not too proud of it. We've taken a hit with tobacco, but it's so ironic that Duke University was built on the back of tobacco as was Wake Forest University, great medical centers and educational centers that all came about because of that horrible thing called tobacco.
Tell me about whether or not you see, it seems—I would infer from what
you've just said that you see a pattern of essential continuity across
the various gubernatorial administrations here in this state across say
twenty or thirty years, even not withstanding the Jim Holshouser
Republican administration that popped up in the early
Very. We've had a good clean government. A lot of states around us have had, I hate to use the word dirty government but they haven't been clean. There's no scandal in North Carolina. Whether they're Republican or Democrat, it's been quality leadership. The Republicans came in the first time in a hundred years and ran the house and that's just fine to have a balance like that. It's switched back now to all Democrats. Jim Martin was an excellent Governor for North Carolina. I guess we really are gifted that we've had one guy who's been Governor for sixteen years or will have been sixteen years. He's been fabulous. He was a politician, a pure politician, the first eight years. The second go around, which I had the wonderful opportunity to work for him, that was behind him. He had matured to where he really understood the dynamics of North Carolina and loved the educational capabilities and what have you, loved and appreciated economic development. When he interviewed me, he called me out of the blue and asked me if I would—.
I was about to ask, one of those questions—
All right.
Tell me your story of how Dave Phillips came to be involved in that level in the state's political affairs. What's the background there?
He called me. I had become impressed with him and what he said in the
campaign that he wanted to be a good business Governor. There was a
concern the first go around that he was a little bit too liberal. He had
never tasted business. He was honest, energetic and enthusiastic, but he
didn't totally understand the dynamics of
It's the most exciting four years that I have ever spent. I loved working
for him. He's a hard worker. He is honest. He includes you in
everything. You're right by his side, and he traveled the world. I met
fascinating people from all over the world. But
One of which was regionalism. He believed in regionalism. I had been involved in regionalism here in the Triad. It's a real simple concept, but he saw it work at the Research Triangle Park. He started a thing called Triangle East, which helped Wilson, North Carolina, which is where he's from. But it's a conceptual sort of a thing. The best way I can explain it to you is we are trying to induce people from all over the world to come to our state. We're one of fifty states and that if you've got to get them focused on the Southeast United States as to what is going on with us compared to wherever. From there you've got to get them on our state. Once you get them here, you don't want to talk about a hundred counties and five hundred communities. There really are over five hundred communities in North Carolina. Everybody obviously wants economic development. So we found out through our coming together in the Triad to form a regional partnership that it's like a shopping center. You've got certain anchor tenants. At the same time you've got lots of other folks that they'll pass by in smaller shops in the mall. At least they'll have a shot at the consumer. If you're not putting them in the mall, you're never going to have a shot. To make our rural areas to have some chance of competing, if we can let everybody create the mall and walk them through the mall whether its on a web page or through a book or however we do it and show all of our capabilities. Not everybody wants to live in a big city. Let the buyer shop and figure what suits their taste. So that's the concept of regionalism.
We broke down the state into seven regions. We got the legislature to fund it. So it's easy to say I need to be in the West or on the Coast or I need to be in the Triangle for this reason. Once you're there, you have a shot at twelve, fifteen, eighteen counties and lots of cities. Everybody cooperates. Why let them out? When you've got a buyer, don't let them out of the mall. Lock the doors. Just get a little piece of them, but don't let them go to another state. That's what had been happening. What's happening is all these other states are starting to emulate what we did. It's nothing but common sense. It's easy to do but psychologically it's another barrier that people try to protect their turf. Developers and politicians, it's just some of the same old stuff. But it's evolved into being a very successful concept and program.
Was it hard to sell businesses considering North Carolina for the first time on North Carolina did you find? Or maybe a better question is what was the pattern of response to your solicitation that they consider North Carolina as a place to locate?
We've got a great product in North Carolina. So it's an easy sell
compared to most states. It goes back to the Research Triangle Park and
the universities and the airports and all that infrastructure that has
evolved over the last forty years. It's just a quality state. You've got
a little bit of everything here. You've got basic manufacturing; you've
got high tech; you've got things that appeal to the lifestyle of
executives. We've learned that that's important whether they like to
fish or snow ski or play golf. If you think about, most states just
don't have that. I mean, if you think about the Southeast, there are no
other states that have mountains except North Carolina. They all come
into North Carolina, the mountains or our coast, which is fabulous. We
have an edge. They've either been here to participate in something from
a lifestyle standpoint. They
What would you say were the principal challenges to the model of development that you had in mind. Were there any great hurdles that had to be overcome? Were there any losers along the way you had to try to accommodate and bring along and the success story as well?
This whole battle of incentives. A major situation that is still going on. We had never competed, and there was a lot of built up frustration when I first got into office as to why the state lost BMW. We lost to South Carolina. We had been in office ninety days and here came Mercedes. We felt compelled to really go after them and did and put an incentive package worth about one hundred million dollars together for them. Something of that magnitude had never taken place in this state before. It boiled down to three states, Alabama, South Carolina, and North Carolina. South Carolina had gotten BMW because of enormous incentives and basically bought it and were very creative in the way they bought it through their state ports and the way they financed it and things of that nature. So that was the beginning of quote the incentive wars. Mercedes became the worst of all of them. There's never been anything as bad since. Mercedes played it beautifully. They played us all off against each other. Alabama gave them the most by far.
Let me interrupt right here. I just need to turn this tape over.
Okay.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Okay. All going.
Alabama ended up giving them total elimination of any state income taxes for up to twenty years or the investment they put into it would be really five hundred million dollars. The newspapers claim it was worth 350 million dollars compared to our 100 million dollars. Frankly it's worth a lot more than that because there are a lot of other deals that any expansion or any additions during that twenty years, a billion or two billion they invest, they get it all back. They were hoping for putting Alabama on the map, which they did. The world was just astonished. So we understand what the state was trying to accomplish.
Not an economic play for Alabama or not in the narrow sense.
Correct. It was profiled what they were hoping for to pay it off was all
the supplier companies coming there and paying full taxes. Get the
mother ship, and let all the other ships pay for the freight. A lot of
companies have gone there, and they've hired a lot of people, and
they've done a great job training them. But it's still going to cost
Alabama a lot of money. You can debate is that PR; is that
advertising—what are the intangibles. Well North Carolina just wasn't
desperate. We're still not desperate. We've been so good for so long
that we didn't have to play that game. However we've played it to the
degree that we felt compelled to do it. We thought we would be pretty
darned competitive. We were just doing a pretty good job and that South
Carolina was still more aggressive than we were because they felt
compelled after they won BMW they wanted Mercedes too. They've got a
great location near Charleston where all the cars will be shipped out
and products will be shipped in. Our ports weren't as strong as
Charleston.
Did the legislature cooperate in crafting the sort of regulatory environment that you thought was appropriate?
They did. We had a healthy battle with the Department of Health and
Natural Resources. We finally had to create a special task force to help
us deal with each other because our job was to go after business. Yes.
We've learned that certain businesses are not good for the environment.
We didn't want to go after them. We turned them down. We were educated,
meaning all of us that recruited businesses all
Let me take a different sort of question. Thinking back across your span working in business in North Carolina, '60s forward, can you talk about the way you became integrated into networks and can you describe the networks of business leaders both within furniture probably initially I suppose and then more widely? Can you describe that network that prevails both formal and informal?
Well the one thing that I was very surprised to learn was when we first got the major CEOs of the Triad together for the first luncheon. We were trying to create a regional approach—.
This is during your tenure in Raleigh.
No, this is prior to that. This is when I was involved in, the head of
the Piedmont Triad Partnership, prior to that, what we called the
Piedmont Triad Development Corporation. Tom Hearn, President of Wake
Forest, represented Winston; Jim Melvin ex-mayor of Greensboro,
represented Greensboro; and I represented High Point. I had been
involved because I was head of the Chamber of Commerce and head of the
High Point Economic Development Corporation and things like that. First
meeting we put together, we hired, not hired, we invited the five
biggest CEOs from each city. Found out that the head RJ Reynolds had
never met the head of Jefferson Pilot. We were dumbfounded. You would
think that these networks do exist, that people just come across them in
their lives. But they don't. We found that in these regions, and we
found
In my work for the Program a couple of years ago, I did a series on politics in the '60s and that spun off a series on North Carolina GOP particularly reaching back even further. One of the themes was the broad transformation away from the traditional () to the Democrat party in the South over to especially in national and statewide elections to elect a lot of Republicans in the last ten or twenty years, a broad shift in the South in that in those years. Can you talk about your sense of the parties in the South? Why for example Dave Phillips is maybe still a Democrat when as you say some people might have taken your measure and said I bet he's in the GOP?
My father was the Democratic mayor of High Point. I came along and just
registered as Democrat back in the late '50s early '60s, I guess. Just
never changed. My wife is a Republican. I've always been real open as to
whom I support. It's, when Jim Martin asked me to be on DOT board. He
called me up and said, 'Would you serve?' I said, 'I'd love to.' He
said, 'What's your party; what's your party affiliation?' I figured well
that's going to be the shortest appointment in history. I said, 'I'm a
Democrat.' He
Another question. Does the state spend the right amount of, invest the right level of resources in education from a business leader's perspective and I'm thinking both at primary and secondary on the one hand, public schools, and then the higher ed level.
I think they spend most of their money on education. I've forgotten
exactly what the figures. Two-thirds of all the revenue come into
education in North Carolina. It's probably the most important things
obviously that you can put your money into. I think the universities
could charge more tuition, and they're discussing all that. Some of the
graduate schools are charging more, the business schools and things of
this nature because they can get more. It's the pricing of their peer
group. The university system itself is so highly regarded. It's such a
value. The general feeling of people I've talked to in the state, we all
know very well that you could charge more, and you're not going to have
any problem whatsoever. That could help. If we're losing professors,
then we're crazy not to charge more. It's so hard to get money out of
the legislature. It's going to be
The high schools in North Carolina are getting better. We've got a long way to go. Jim Hunt is extremely concerned about all this stuff. So I became educated about all of this myself, which I had never totally appreciated. It goes back to even his Smart Start, which is a very creative idea. But we've got to pay our teachers more, and we've got to have higher standards. He's made tremendous progress in all that.
Our community college system is one of the jewels of economic development. It's a phenomenon. We have fifty-eight campuses. One of the key reasons we have been so successful in economic development the last fifty years is because we have such a fabulous system. However, we're not paying those teachers enough. There's a major article that came out this week that talked about we're losing a lot of them. They're frustrated, and they're banding together, and it's awful. So, to what degree we can charge more for community college, I don't know. That's going to be tough. The high schools, you just got to put more money into them. Colleges can charge more. We want to be competitive and we want to provide what has been said for so long is the backbone of North Carolina is the reasonable priced education system. So it's got to be a balance. Education is a number one priority.
And you think the business community will rally to that view.
Exactly. If you don't have education, you don't have economic development. There's educated workers. That's going to be more important in the future than it has in the past.
Last question because I know we're bumping up against the edge of our time here. Think back across these thirty or forty years on the question of say race and gender. How minorities, racial minorities and women have entered the work place in the North Carolina economy. Reflect for a minute on the course of that transition and its relative success or lack thereof. What's your, take the measure of the integration of racial minorities and women in North Carolina workplace across that span.
I think it has been very successful. Just think about where we were. I can remember where I was in the '50s and early '60s. Yet, you're talking about just one generation. To have that change in mindset in one generation, it usually would take in my opinion longer to deal with this evolution. But I think we've come a long way. It's hard to believe what was there before. But I think it's necessary, and it's marveling absolutely necessary. It's somewhat embarrassing that we as a state or a nation didn't deal with it before. But then you travel the world and find out that we're ahead of most of the world. We're true leaders.
I remember when I hired a female to be a plant manager for me in the textile business in the '70s. People thought it was incredible. They looked at me and I said, 'Well, I think she's the best.' She was fabulous and did a fabulous job. But some of my peers in the textile industry had just never conceived of such a thing. So I felt good about it.
When I went to Raleigh, I was exposed more to minorities and not just
from North Carolina but around the world, and it gave me a great feeling
that dealing with all these people that I learned about them. I'm not
talking about just North Carolinians or blacks and whites but the trips
we took to South Africa with a delegation of blacks from
We could go on but I know we're at the limit of our time. Thank you so much.
Thank you. I love—
END OF INTERVIEW